The Dead Path (7 page)

We were running. Tristram and I were running for our lives. This is where we parted. This is
 …

Then Nicholas saw it.

Almost masked by the mossy trunks of booyong and red ash was the huge water pipe. It was almost three meters in diameter; its steel flanks were rusted to a dark red, and it sat on a green patinated concrete footing half a meter thick. It ran perpendicular to the creek bed, maybe seven or eight meters in each direction, before it was swallowed by blood vine and silver-furred star nightshade. If he were to tap its dark, rusty curve, it would ring hollow and mournful as an oubliette.

This is where we left each other,
he thought.
Tristram and I.
His mouth was dry. The remembered taste of terror was as strong as alum.

Where the hulking pipe crossed the rocky streambed, its ancient concrete foundation was deeper. Two parallel tunnels, each almost a meter wide, pierced the concrete foundation like dark nostrils.

Nicholas stopped, lungs still working hard to reclaim the oxygen he’d spent in the frantic chase. His panting was the only sound. No wind shifted leaves. No bird called. No insect chirped.

The pipe, he could see, was too high to climb. It ran who-knew-how-far into the woods in each direction. The only way to pass beyond it was to go under, through the narrow tunnels.

He walked up the creek bed closer to the pipe, and his footsteps castaneted stones together; the sound echoed in the shotgun tunnels like the cavernous clicking of some dead giant’s teeth.

He knelt.

The twin tunnels ran right through the concrete base of the pipe, four meters or more. They were as dark as night, but he could just make out circles of light at their far ends. But those circles were dimly shrouded and imperfect. Black shapes moved across them, roughening their edges and peppering them with little shifting silhouettes.

Spiders.

Both tunnels were thick with webs and spiders. And whatever happened to the dead boys happened on the other side.

Nicholas got to his feet, turned around, and started back down the creek toward the gully cliff, heading back to Carmichael Road.

For the second time in his life, the spiders had beaten him.

Chapter
5
   
   NOVEMBER 1982

  I
t was Sunday morning, and Nicholas and Tristram were deep in concentration, hunkered in patches of sunlight on the hardwood boards of the Boyes’ front veranda. They had set up two enormous opposing ramps made from Tristram’s seemingly inexhaustible supply of orange Hot Wheels racetrack. Every so often, the boys would look up from their labors and grin at one another. They were getting ready for one hell of a car crash.

Tristram and his family lived in the street behind the Closes, in (if you asked Katharine Close) a palace of a house. Nicholas would jump the Closes’ back fence (a rickety line of perennially damp hardwood palings held together by a thick crest of trumpet vine), run through Mrs. Giles’s yard, then up Airlie Crescent to the enormous house at number seven.

The Boyes had moved in two and a half years ago.

Nicholas and Tristram became friends. Tristram would shortcut through Mrs. Giles’s at a quarter to eight every school morning, and he and Nicholas would begrudgingly escort Suzette to school. Imagining that he and Tristram were her bodyguards, ready to pounce on would-be attackers or leap in front of assassins’ bullets, compensated for her girlish chatter about love spells and bar graphs and how smart bees were.

After school when homework was done, and at weekends, Nicholas would visit the Boyes’ house. This was better, because their place
was
a palace compared with 68 Lambeth Street. The Boyes had four bedrooms as well as Mr. and Mrs. Boyes’ master bedroom, which had its own bathroom (Tristram snuck Nicholas in for a look one Saturday when his parents had left them home alone and Gavin was playing some football final), another
two
bathrooms (Tristram called them dunny cans), and wide verandas on three sides. Best of all, the entire house was on stumps, so there was a palace-worth of cool, dark dirt underneath for racing scooters, conducting experiments with bleach and sundry garage chemicals, building Owen guns, and torturing ants by dropping them in conical ant lion pits and watching them taken from below like hapless sailors by a hungry kraken.

Nicholas sometimes had Tristram over to his house, but there was less to do there. The Closes’ house was small, its underneath exposed and useless for private acts like making army IDs and shanghais and plans of conquest. The only place that was dark and away from his mother’s scowl and Suzette’s curiosity was the garage. But Nicholas didn’t like taking anyone else in there. It was Dad’s space. His tools were there. His old suitcases were there. Being in the garage made him feel weird—angry and sad and a bit lonely. He could hardly remember his father, but stepping into the dark garage with its smell of grease and sawdust brought a flash of the only enduring image of him: a scarecrow-thin man leaning over the whitewashed garage bench as he sharpened a saw with one hand while drinking from a squat bottle of amber liquid with the other; then, hearing Nicholas, he looked down and smiled—half of his face bright with yellow light through the dusty window, half as dark as the cobwebbed shadows in the garage’s far corners—and slid the bottle away into the bench drawer. No, the garage was not a place for games.

This Sunday morning, Nicholas had come over straight from church (the Boyes didn’t go to church—further evidence of their grand good fortune). Suzette had changed into shorts and T-shirt to tend her little garden patch. She’d found an old book somewhere that had belonged to their dad, and had become excited about planting tiny seeds and urging them up into curling green things. After a spat over TV channels, Nicholas had once threatened to dig up Suze’s garden and she’d gone totally spack, hitting him and screaming that he’d better not
dare!
The one male in a house with two females, he’d been wise enough not to. As Suzette screwed on her sunhat, Nicholas had pulled on his gym boots, kissed his mother’s cheek, and jumped the back fence.

He and Tristram had eased into the day’s play with a hunt through the Boyes’ games cupboard. While Nicholas and Suzette had an incomplete chess set and a deck of cards, the Boyes had an Aladdin’s cave of entertainment: Bermuda Triangle, Payday, Microdot (complete with cool plastic Lugers, stiletto knives, and wirecutters), Mastermind, Grand Mastermind, Squatter, The Game of Life, Mouse Trap, Clue, Chinese Checkers, Monopoly (British
and
American versions), several decks of cards, and a roulette wheel that Tristram said came from a P&O steamer. But this was too bright a day for the lethargy of board games. The sunlight had a tart sting, the jacarandas were dropping sweet blizzards of lavender flowers, nasturtiums blazed between roses … no, today called for violence. So they set up the killer jumps for their Hot Wheels cars.

“We’re going to Fraser at Christmas,” said Tristram, slotting an orange plastic tongue into the end of a section of track. The boys had appropriated the whole front veranda and had nearly finished the two ramps, each facing the other. At the farthest ends were kitchen chairs for height. The tracks swooped down to the floorboards, ran two meters, then swept up ramp stays of phone books and atlases. If they timed their releases right, two cars should collide spectacularly in midair.

“Oh?”

“You don’t know where Fraser Island is, do you?”

Nicholas shrugged. “Up your fat arse?”

Tristram chuckled. The boys had just discovered the joy of insults, and Nicholas was the acknowledged master. Not knowing what or where Fraser was didn’t upset him, but news of the Boyes’ trip did: if Tristram went away, the Christmas break would be really boring.

Tristram pulled out his ace. “Dad’s going to hire a Land Rover.”

“A Land Rover? Really?” Nicholas couldn’t disguise his excitement. Land Rovers were what the SAS sped to battle in. They had aluminium bodies and wouldn’t rust. “Wow. Will your dad let you drive it?”

Tristram shook his head and grinned. That was one thing Nicholas liked about him: he might be rich, but he was honest. “I reckon he’ll let Gavin drive it, though. He’s thirteen now. Dad learned to drive on Pop’s tractor when he was thirteen, so …” His ramp finished, Tristram squatted back on his heels and looked at Nicholas. “What were you going to tell me?”

“About what?”

Tristram came to Nicholas’s ramp to help him finish.

“You said you found something on the way home from school on Wednesday, then you went all funny and shut up.”

Nicholas felt some warmth go out of the morning. The dead bird outside the woods. The bird with no head … well, with a strange head made of woven sticks and its own scrawny legs. He had wanted to tell Tristram about it on the way home from school Thursday and Friday, but Suzette had been with them and he didn’t want to freak her out with gory talk about birds with legs cut off and the weirdos who did such things. She was really easy to upset right now; for instance, she hated walking home past the shops, but wouldn’t explain why. And, to be honest, he didn’t know how to phrase the story about the bird. He wanted to sound cool about it, matter-of-fact. But he also wanted his best friend to know how creepy it was, how the sight of it—not just limp and dead, but so helpless and mutilated—had made his stomach grip tight with unexplainable fear.

“I found a dead bird down near the woods.”

Tristram tore the sticky tape off with his teeth and secured track to the telephone books. “So?”

“It had its head and legs cut off.”

He watched for Tristram’s reaction. This would be the decider: if Tris’s expression was serious, Nicholas could finish the tale with its bizarre ending. But if he wore his “what bullshit” look, Nicholas would shrug the story off and change the subject to a cool book about Tiger tanks he’d found in the library. Tristram looked up, and Nicholas felt a wave of warmth for his friend: his expression was both serious and inquisitive.

“Yeah? Cut off like by a mower cut off? They mow that grass out front.”

Nicholas shook his head. “Cut off, cut off. On purpose.”

He described how the bird’s head was gone and replaced with a handmade sphere of woven twigs, the poor creature’s legs as horns, and the strange symbol painted there in what
had
to be blood. By the time he’d finished, Nicholas’s voice had dropped to a whisper and his heart was thudding in his chest.

“And?” asked Tristram. They knew each other well enough to know when things were still unsaid.

“And I think …” Nicholas bit his lip and frowned. “I think something came up behind me.”
From the woods.
He shook his head. “I smelled something really bad, and then I ran home.”

“Was it … was it a grown-up?”

Nicholas thought about that. “I don’t know. I think so. Whatever it was, it felt … it felt big. And old.”

Tristram nodded, chewed his lip. “Did I tell you I found a cat down there? When we first moved in, before we were friends. A dead cat on the gravel path.”

Nicholas shook his head.

“It was just bones really,” said Tristram. His voice dropped steadily to a whisper. “Dead for ages. Orange fur, all dried up like a mummy. But it was a mess. Its paws were cut off.”

Nicholas stared. He didn’t mind being trumped—cat beat bird hands down. Besides, Tristram wasn’t showing off, not this time. In fact, this was the first time he could ever remember Tristram looking … well, so worried.

“Did you tell your parents?”

“Tell your parents what?” asked Mrs. Boye, emerging from the shadows of the hallway carrying two fruit cordials and a plate of TeeVee Snacks. She was what Nicholas would describe in later years as a stately woman: well dressed, well spoken, well educated. Utterly humorless.

“That we’re going to make some noise,” said Tristram without missing a beat.

He turned to Nicholas and shot him a wink that Mrs. Boye couldn’t see. Nicholas smiled to himself—Tris was one smooth bastard.

“Well, we’d rather you didn’t,” said Mrs. Boye, surveying the ramps. “Your father’s had a big week and we’re going to have a rest.”

Mr. Boye was a Businessman who worked for an Investment Company and often had to Extend Himself on Behalf of the Firm on evenings and at weekends, so if he and Mrs. Boye wanted a rest, then total silence was expected of the Boye boys.

“Why don’t you go to Nicholas’s house?” she asked Tristram.

Never mind asking me,
thought Nicholas. But Tristram looked over at him and winked again, slyly.

“Sure,” said Nicholas.

“Have some morning tea then,” said Mrs. Boye, and left for the darkened master bedroom.

The boys drank and surveyed their handiwork. “It would have been good,” said Nicholas. He looked over at Tristram. His fair-haired friend was grinning. “What?”

“Let’s check it out.”

Nicholas knew what he meant. The bird. A sudden fear galloped through his stomach, but he swallowed it down and grinned back. “Tommy guns?”

“Of course.”

They quickly drained their drinks and flew.

  T
hey moved like shadows, quiet and slow, hunched to stay below the grass line. The dry fronds chattered around them in the warm air, hissing a constant warning to
beware
. They gripped the stocks of their submachine guns. Tristram led; there was never a question about that—he was bigger and tougher, and if he had to go down to a Jap bullet, goddammit, he would. Nicholas saw him raise his left hand and they both dropped like stones. Nicholas crawled up.

“What is it?”

“Got any grenades?” hissed Tristram.

Nicholas looked around him. His fingers fell on a lumpy rock peppered with pink quartz. “Only one.”

“Well, hell,” whispered Tristram, and he looked at Nicholas with narrowed eyes. He cocked his head and grinned crookedly. “You better make it count then.” He pointed.

Nicholas carefully raised his eyes above the grass line. About four meters ahead was the pillbox (disguised cleverly as a council garbage bin). He lowered again and pulled an imaginary pin from the rock.

“Cover me,” he said, then counted silently: three, two, one …

They both leaped to their feet. Tristram aimed his tommy gun (a wooden chair leg with a nail for a trigger and a crosspiece screwed below for a magazine) and fired: “Ach-ach-ach-ach-ach!!,” while Nicholas drew back the rock and hurled it in an overarm cricket bowl. Then they both hit the ground.

Clang-rattle-rattle-clunk. The sound of rock falling inside the metal drum.

Tristram grinned. “Good throw!”

Nicholas beamed. The sun was high and hot, they were dusty and dirty and totally happy. Life was grand. “We got ’em that time,” he agreed.

“That, my friend, calls for a Lucky,” said Tristram, and he pulled out a packet of white candy cigarettes. He shucked the box at Nicholas, who drew one and put it in the corner of his mouth. Tristram drew another. Nicholas thumbed an invisible Zippo and lit them. They puffed and sucked, stood and walked.

They were on the gravel path, wood guns slung around their thin shoulders. To their right, Carmichael Road ran like a lazy, bitumen canal. To their left was the crowding mass of the woods.
You can just
feel
them
, thought Nicholas.
Even with your eyes shut, you’d know they were there.
Alive. Shadowed and watching. Waiting to breathe you in and in, to draw you deep inside, warm and moist and dark and smelling of secrets, where strange hands would lift you and take you
 …